


ambition give an hour

by cartographies



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-19
Updated: 2015-11-19
Packaged: 2018-05-02 10:03:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5244236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographies/pseuds/cartographies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She had moved away at her city’s most exciting moment, and had always regretted it. Now she was back and able to see the promise of that excitement fulfilled, and to know that prosperity was in no small part Alexander’s doing. This is the neat formula, by which she does not hide Alexander from herself and her motivations, but merely - spreads him around a little.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ambition give an hour

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [this letter](http://founders.archives.gov/?q=Author%3A%22Church%2C%20Angelica%22&s=1111311111&r=6).

Angelica is still awake when Alexander comes in. It is very late; Eliza has long since gone to bed. 

She returns to London in a week. This is pure selfishness on her part, although she has held off her husband’s peevishness at the duration of her stay for this long with protestations that she did not want to leave her sister: while they were upstate Eliza had found she was expecting another child, her fifth, and the beginnings of her sister’s pregnancies were always hard on her. But the last two thirds of them, she said, always more than made up for it, being ridiculously easy. Now that statement has been proven true, Eliza has begun to radiate fine health and good cheer, and Angelica has no more excuse to put off her return.

Eliza, although never saying it in quite so many words, finds Angelica’s comparative lack of fertility baffling. When Angelica had shared that she and her husband kept separate bedrooms, Eliza had looked at her much the same as if she had suddenly sprouted a second head. Angelica knows that it isn’t because Eliza is unfamiliar with it as a concept. Their parents had done the same. But the abundant sexual pleasure Eliza has found in her marriage, that glance said, meant she found it dreadful that her sister was not equally blessed. An acquaintance had once spoken disparagingly of men who, in pursuit of their own vulgar needs, kept their poor wives producing children at a steady rate of one every two years, and cast a baleful eye in Alexander and Eliza’s direction in case Angelica was in danger of missing the target of this criticism. Angelica had found it difficult not to laugh. That very same evening she’d seen Eliza shove Alexander bodily into a broom closet when the party had run on too long for her taste.

So she had stayed, even after their return to the city. Despite the pleasure of being home, of the company of her sister and family, she could not bear to return to New York only to leave immediately. Angelica had moved away at her city’s most exciting moment, and had always regretted it. Now she was back and able to see the promise of that excitement fulfilled, and to know that prosperity was in no small part Alexander’s doing. This is the neat formula, by which she does not hide Alexander from herself and her motivations, but merely - spreads him around a little. She spends her days walking every inch of New York she can get at, followed by the joy of coming back and speaking to Alexander of all she’s seen. 

Alexander has been very solicitous since their return, although he is as busy as ever. His debt plan has still not gone through, and greeting them at the dock when they returned, his happiness at seeing them all had seemed to have to struggle forth from where it was trapped under the weariness that stamped his features. He spends all day at his office, but makes a point of returning in time for supper and spending his evenings with the family. He often returns to his office after the children are put to bed. Eliza has been too tired and ill to put up much protest, but Angelica has seen that start to change with her health in the last few days. 

Still, three in the morning is a late return, and he startles to see her when she comes into the hall to greet him.

“I don’t think you have grounds to comment on the lateness of the hour,” and a raised eyebrow are the response to her query. He looks more than tired, now, a nervous jittery misery that she has never quite seen before. His hand moves up to smooth over his hair in an exhausted gesture, but jerks his hand away at the last moment and looks at it as if the limb belongs to someone else. 

“It’s the insomniac’s prerogative to haunt their own home. Or sister’s home. Being out on the streets is a different matter.” There is something that makes her think that he has not been in his office all this time. She suspects nothing unsavory, but a drink in a tavern as if he were a younger, more hopeful self - she hopes he might give in to the temptation sometimes. She wants to ask. But, she reminds herself a bit late, she isn’t his wife. The tiresome responsibility of keeping track of a husband’s movements belongs to her sister. Angelica is genuinely glad to be free of it.

“You know our home is always yours.” He offers this with a tone of gallantry at odds with how he is relying on the wall to hold him up. “Or, my study is your study, as the case may be.” 

He nods towards the book still in her hands, in the direction of the dim candlelight spilling into the hall from the room in question. 

“I found myself in desperate need of reading material.”

“Eliza’s gothics trying your patience?” The settled fondness in his voice is the thing she keeps running up against: no matter how free her sister is with the details of even the most intimate aspects of her life, no matter how seamlessly both she and Alexander fold her into this strange trinity, something inevitably comes along to remind her that marriage is, in the end, a private crucible. Old river stones, his words just now, smooth and worn and made lovely by the sheer onslaught of time.

She just returns his raised eyebrow. It seems to have gotten stuck that way in his exhaustion. “Alexander, I know you read them. I've seen you.”

“I don’t deny it. But you have more sense than either of us.”

She doesn’t, really, but she likes that they think so. It’s true that Eliza’s choice of literature largely bores her. 

“It’s not only your library I’ve been free with. Your liquor cabinet is less well-stocked than before, but don’t worry. There’s enough for you to have a drink. Which it looks like you need.”

Angelica holds out her hand, and he takes it.  
  
*  
  
Drink in hand, cravat loosened, Alexander slumps in his desk chair. He doesn’t slump often, from natural inclination, but unlike other men he doesn’t stay ramrod straight as preparation against possible attack. He’d be ready to fight lying in bed, barely awake, in nothing but his nightshirt. Angelica perches on the desk in front of him. 

“So,” she says. “Update from the trenches?” 

“Progress has been made. Finally.” 

“Then why the frown?” She reaches out and taps him smartly on the forehead, right on the crease between his brows. He catches her hand as it withdraws. She expects him to kiss it, to play-act the gallant as he likes to do with her, but he just folds his fingers over hers and holds on to it, as if saving it for later. 

“Because I’m going to have to make a devil’s bargain.”

“Did you really think you would get out of this without having to?”

His look of consternation tells her that was exactly what he thought. If there is any man to whom compromise is simply not a word in their vocabulary, it’s Alexander. “And here I was dreading all evening having to come home to you and having to inform you about the sacrifice of my principles,” he mutters.

“Bullshit. My husband is a Member of Parliament. I don’t have any romantic notions about the nobility of politics, and you know it.”

“Your years away from us _have_ changed you. I remember telling you to temper your idealism, once. I’ve always relied on you to keep me honest.”

Angelica laughs. “First, I remember no such incident. I’m not saying I didn’t need to be told that, but certainly you were never in a position to be the one to do so. Second, keeping you honest is exactly what I’m trying to do. You scold Jefferson for letting his ideals blind him to reality. Don’t do the same.”

Alexander bares his teeth, an expression that in different conditions she imagines he presses into a service as a mocking smile. But it is late, he is at least a little drunk, and he is mocking himself most of all. “Well, I won’t be able to lay that charge on Jefferson much longer. There’s going to be a deal. Tonight was the first testing of the waters. Tomorrow,” and he laughs a bit, “we are going to have each other for dinner.” 

Angelica feels a small thrill in her gut, that here, in the deepest hour of the night, she is going to be the first to hear something that is going to rattle the foundations, because with Alexander she knows better than to expect anything less. 

“It isn't polite to keep a lady waiting,” she says when he follows this tantalizing statement with silence. He kisses her palm, and finally releases her hand.

“New York. I’m to be her Judas. A southern capital in exchange for the needed Congressional votes. Not said in so many words today. I suppose we'll get to the unpleasantness of articulating it tomorrow.”

Angelica rolls her eyes. She hopes his plan being passed will mark the end of his self-pitying references, although she prefers the Bible being thus ill-used to Shakespeare. She tells him as much, and: “You're getting considerably more than thirty pieces of silver. New York does not even have to be crucified to cleanse the nation of at least a few sins.”

“Dear sister,” he says one hand over his heart, “have pity for my feelings. I have to be Jefferson’s _dinner guest_ tomorrow.”

“Oh, and here I thought they were going to be making a meal of you. You should count yourself lucky.” Then she just stares at him. If he wants her to keep him honest, he should at least meet her halfway. 

“The revolution,” he says, and then is quiet for a long moment. “It was the best time in my life.”

Angelica is going to rib him, take him to task for self-pity, but she stops herself. She knows what he is trying to say, that he regrets that at the time he did not appreciate its shining clarity for what it was, given the cloak of confusion and blood it wore, and the blinders of his own desire. Now look at the muddle he has to wade through. It’d make anyone yearn for the simple pleasures of starving to death in a Pennsylvania winter. Men. 

Even more, there is a raw thread to his voice the exact tenor of which she has not heard before. When did he start being vulnerable with her, and only with her? She isn’t sure she likes the change. Alexander used to give his best self to her, or at least his sharpest and brightest, his words to her like knives handed blade facing outward. Somewhere this has begun, in his letters to her where she was a safe ocean away. She isn’t flattering herself. She feels certain that he would not speak like this to anyone else. Even to her, she thinks he would deny he said it by the light of morning, or pass it off with a joke.

She almost says it was the best time in her life too. But she stops herself again. Once she had thought so, but not anymore. What a strange blessing of her adulthood, to take the shine off things she once romanticized. 

“Yes, I suppose it would feel that way.” She touches her hand to his hair, and that’s all it takes for him to put his head into her lap, like a child, but snuffling dramatically to make her laugh.

But then he is done with his spell of moroseness. He must get to bed, and rise ready for the next battle. Alexander lifts his head and meets her eyes, a wry twitch breaking up the hard lines that have formed at the corner of his mouth. “The truth is, I feel badly about how badly I don’t feel. This plan - it’s going to be something that _lasts_.” He sounds like himself again, and she can’t bear the feeling of love that rises into her throat.

“Yes, and you get the satisfaction of forever knowing that Jefferson is as much of a hypocrite as you’ve always thought,” she says cheerfully, to push it back down to where it typically lives, coiled and waiting beneath her ribs. 

“I’ll drink to that,” he says, and lets the ring of their empty glasses clinking together echo off the walls.


End file.
